Case Study: UX/UI Design of a
Healthy Screen Habit Super App
Ali Abbas Zaidi - 40024647
Julien Xu - 40095332
The evolution of communication systems has provided many benefits over the years. It allowed people to interact on global platforms or through direct messages from anywhere around the world, including from the comfort of their home. As of right now, it is almost mandatory to use such devices and softwares due to the obligations of social distancing caused by a global pandemic.
Intro
Understanding the problem
However, with or without the pandemic, such technologies have had a dramatic effect on the lifestyle of each individual. A high amount of time spent in front of a screen regularly can severely impact not only physical health, but mental health as well. The need to use a device can overlap other basic needs such as eating, exercising and sleeping. This need creates a feeling of always wanting to be “up to date” with events that are going through social media. Excessive use of social media can then lead to anxiety due the amount of exposure each individual is letting out. This can have some long-lasting effects on a user’s well-being.

In order to solve all these issues, it is necessary to find a solution to its main source: screen usage. Some applications implement ways to reduce screen usage such as setting reminders, showing user progress, grayscale, muting notifications, time frames and so on. The problem is, there aren’t many large scale applications that have the ability to restrict the user’s access to certain apps completely. This leads to users being able to “cheat” their goals and revert back to their old habits. Also, users will tend to give up after a period of time due to lack of satisfaction created by the restrictions.
Understanding the problem
With our “super app”, users will be able to be able to accomplish their goals with more incentives. The app will be able to regulate the amount of time spent on every application. If the user exceeds the amount of time he sets, the system will lock the user out of the app until the next cycle. It might be a challenge at first but this is a good way for users to develop better screen habits. If a user achieves his weekly objective, he will be rewarded with a discount of any available retailer of his choice. This creates a good incentive for the user to apply these restrictions because he is left feeling satisfied in the process. They will develop better habits as they complete more and more objectives over time.
Our Solution
The first step in the design process is to better understand the demographic of our targeted audience. According to an article from Springer Link, both preschool children and young adults are at the highest risk for smartphone-related addictive behavior. The design of our application will follow trends such as glassmorphism because it will give a more modern feel for our users.
Research
Now that we have a better understanding of who our main users are, we need to know what are the needs of our users. We created a survey to collect information from various individuals ranging from age 12 to 50. The survey allows us to identify what are the motives of our users for installing our app and what features they would like the app to have implemented.
Surveys
This section shows the most common effects caused by prolonged screen usage and the percentages of individuals from the survey who feel affected by these consequences
Case Study: UX/UI Design of a
Healthy Screen Habit Super App
With enough information collected from research and surveys, we were able to create personas based on our target audience. The main reason we created these personas is to highlight the differences in goals, frustrations, personalities and motivations of each archetype. Since the focus of this design process is based on screen usage, we thought it was useful to include which platforms each persona used in order to get a better understanding of the apps that are causing these screen usage problems.
Personas
This section showed us that the majority of individuals were either unwilling or hesitant to use an app that restricted their accessibility. The control that the app can have may be an undesirable feature for them. The level of control will be toned down accordingly.
The created personas now help us create a typical user journey for our targeted users. The user journey is meant to show the behavior of our targeted users when failing to resolve the problem. The user starts by realizing his high screen usage, then he tries to apply solutions to improve his habits to then ultimately give up on the process due to frustration or lack of satisfaction.
User Journey
Results show that the majority of people want to have a certain level of freedom like time extensions or emergency mode. The most requested feature is a reward system that rewards the user for achieving their objectives. Another highly requested feature is a fitness tracker that can help our users live a healthier lifestyle.
Storyboard showcases our users thoughts but also their actions in a visual way. The storyboard we created is meant to show a success scenario when the user is interacting with our app. It doesn’t show the specific functionalities of the app but it displays the user experience we are trying to achieve with our targeted audience.
Storyboard
The main functionalities of the application are shown on this user flow diagram. Each section highlights a different page within our application. These sections include the notification system, the scheduled usage, the temporary usage and the emergency mode that are all connected together when the user wishes to use a particular application. Even if the user surpasses his allocated time, he still has the option to either extend the amount of time or enter “emergency mode” in case of an emergency. This feature allows the user to not feel imprisoned by the restrictions because he still has control over his level of accessibility. Other sections such as the reward system increase the user’s satisfaction when completing the goals he set during the first time setup.
Application Concept
Now that we knew how our app would operate, we designed sketches of the most relevant sections of our app. The design was not final but it helped us have a better understanding of the way we wanted our app to look like.
Sketches